Anyone can buy a soul. Even the meanest villages have dealers now, and prices remain low, thanks to the border wars five years ago. To buy a specific soul, though, Erynd has to deal with a ghost taker.

She hobbles through the Old Bridge Market, her stick slipping on the cracking timbers. Despite the lashing rain and spray from the torrent below, most of the tents have their flaps tied back, revealing jars with tiny figures, servants shambling unnaturally and crates that rattle on their shelves. Near the shattered middle of the once vital causeway, Erynd stops at one that’s closed, a white eye painted across its flaps. She studies it with her own white eye, pushes a flap aside with her stick and enters.

A hanging lantern illuminates a small front room. Its glow barely exceeds the flicker in the crystal that powers it or those in the crystals displayed on the table below. Bulbous and misshapen, these crystals wouldn’t fit a standard socket, and no one would consider them art. Erynd wonders whose souls they contain--and whose the taker claims they contain. That’s why she's insisted that hers be fresh.

Ponge ducks through a flap in the tent divider, naked except for frayed breeches and completely shorn. His tattoos indicate he’d once been a senior pneumatic and member of the Imperial Society of Mancers. His boniness suggests he hasn’t fared well since. Erynd’s commission is probably his biggest in years, perhaps since her last.

“Is he here?” she says.

Ponge nods.

“And secure?”

Ponge nods again. His lips are so tightly compressed, he seems to lack a mouth.

Erynd shudders. Outside, the rain beats harder, seeping under the canvas walls. She yanks up the greasy collar of her soiled shearling coat and draws it around her throat. She tugs her sleeves down. Inside the right one, the edge of her knife scrapes her wrist, waiting to drop into her palm. She reaches for the divider's flap with her stick.

Ponge blocks her. He arches the white ridge where others have an eyebrow. Erynd pats her coat hard enough to jingle the money pouch hanging at her waist. He's paid half on assignment, half on delivery of a live crystal, and this time he's due a finder's fee too. There’s never been a payout for trust. Ponge steps aside.

Sedgwick Vim is propped in a chair at a small round table lit by a red candle. His long gray ponytail lolls on his shoulder. His head lolls on his ponytail. He faces her, eyes unmoving. Drool sputters over his lips. The scratch on his neck shows he’s been paralyzed.

Nevertheless, his wrists are shackled behind him, and his ankle shackles run through an iron ring bolted to the bridge deck.

Erynd readies her knife and tests the shackles. Heavy and strong.

She kicks the ring. Solidly anchored.

“Bring him to,” she says and hobbles back around the table.

Ponge rubs the scratch on Vim’s neck with his left pinky. Beneath its sharpened nail a gob of clear unguent glistens. A moment later, Vim shivers and lifts his head. His eyes focus on Erynd.

“You’re already old, Sergeant,” he says.

“I wasn’t young long.”

Erynd signals to Ponge. The ghost taker unbuckles a leather tool roll and opens it across the table. Its pockets display a crescent blade for pricking the forehead, bronze tongs for holding the waiting crystal, and a small black bellows for coaxing free the soul.

“Do you have them?” Vim says. “Show me. Show me before--”

Erynd twists her mouth. Would Vim hate it more to see them or to not? The former. If she doesn’t show him, he’ll just think she’s a liar. Erynd unclasps her coat collar. Around her neck she wears a leather thong with two live crystals in simple brass mounts. Their flickers glisten on her rope-scarred throat and the empty third mount.

Vim leans forward. His shackles clank. His voice catches. “Which?”

“This,” Erynd says, holding up a clear crystal with a red flicker, “this is your oldest, Speedwell. I tied him to a post, and before I summoned Ponge I took away a little piece of him every day to remind him of what you Vims did to my squad. And to my own soul.”

Vim stares at the crystal, then at the other: yellow with a green flicker.

“Cumber,” Erynd says. “He didn’t scream as much as his little brother. You'd have been proud.” She strokes the crystals with a crooked thumb. “It’s strange, but I’ve grown attached to them while searching for you.”

“Give,” Vim says.

Erynd shakes her head. She tucks the crystals away and does up her collar tight.

Ponge, meanwhile, plucks a fresh yellow crystal from a pocket in the roll.

“No,” Erynd says, “use this one.”

She twitches her elbow. The knife drops into her hand. Vim shifts back in his seat.

Erynd snorts. As if she’d give him that mercy. She unscrews the pommel and shakes a dark blue crystal out of the hollow hilt onto the roll.

“I bought that for you,” she says, “the day I could finally walk without braces. Let’s begin.”

Ponge nods.

Vim tips his chair over sideways. Erynd’s instincts take charge, and for the first time in years she moves without pain, moves without first planning to move, glides to Vim and slams her knife through his right calf, pinning it to a bridge timber.

“No more running,” she says.

Distracted, she doesn’t notice Ponge reaching down and sticking his right pinky inside her collar to scratch her neck. Beneath its sharpened nail, a different, darker unguent glistens. Erynd stands halfway before falling, paralyzed, on Vim. He laughs, despite his agony.

“I’m tired of running anyway,” he says, “just as Ponge is tired of poverty, and I paid him far more than you did for my commission.” He heaves Erynd off and rattles his shackles. “Unlock me, taker. Then put her in that blue. She'll look good set in a ring.”

Ponge nods.

Erynd can’t smile, but she can see Ponge squat beside Vim, hold the shackles against his abdomen and, despite the enemy general’s struggling, scratch his cheek with his right fingernail. Vim goes numb and flattens.

Ponge turns to the table and trades the dark blue and red crystals for two misshapen ones. He starts arranging his tools. He puckers his lips and squeezes the bellows. It whistles. He smiles with pointed teeth and makes it whistle again.

Erynd revels in her relief from agony for the few moments before her body comes to. Then she quietly wrenches her knife out of Vim, lunges at Ponge and pounds the blade twice into his groin, cutting his femoral arteries. He staggers, slips on the blood gushing over his filthy bare feet, and collapses against the tent wall.

Ponge’s head nods and doesn’t rise.

Erynd wipes her knife on Vim’s doeskin pants, plants her stick, and pushes herself up. She rubs the scratch on her neck through her collar. Earlier she had soaked the wool lining with the same clear unguent that had brought Vim to.

Vim stares up at her, his mouth an O.

She’d howl too if she had the breath. That little exercise was exhausting. She’s losing her legs. And now she’s losing Vim. She watched Ponge extract his sons’ souls, but she can’t perform the procedure herself. Erynd squeezes the bellows. It won’t whistle for her. She clicks the tongs and throws them at Ponge. Then she throws the bellows. Erynd pockets the crescent blade. It could have other uses.

Vim’s blood trickles between the timbers. She could cut his throat, but where’s the victory in simple slaughter? She could leave him here. He should bleed out before the poison wears off. That might seem similar, Erynd thinks, to being in a crystal, his bodiless, helpless waiting like hers at the prison camp he’d run. And Vim would also be conscious, as she had been, not insensible as he would be in a crystal. It wouldn’t be for long enough, though. An unspent soul could last for decades, and he might be dead in an hour.

Erynd picks up the chair and slumps into it. She waits. She plays with her dangling crystals. She flicks the empty mount. Vim’s bleeding slows. She turns his leg with her stick and jabs the wound. It seeps, but it’s no use. He’s going to survive.

Erynd remembers realizing, a mile from the camp, that she'd survive too. Crawling had scraped apart her knees and palms. The barking of Cumber's guard dogs had faded. And Erynd had found a stream. Lapping at it from the rocky bank, she'd first conceived of her revenge, and it had tasted as refreshing as the cool, dark water, as bleakly beautiful as the cool, dark night. Had she imagined that then that Vim would escape his fate, she'd have put the dogs back on the scent.

Then Erynd hears the most exhilarating sound punching through the storm: a baby shrieking. She can’t tell what tent the baby’s in. Whether it’s a girl or a boy. Whether it’s just been born or about to die. The shrieking reminds her, though, that the market is full of wonders, her pouch is full of gold, and, thanks to Vim, she has some time. Erynd almost laughs. So this is what hope feels like. For in a market such as this one, she could surely find another ghost taker.

Stephen S. Power's first novel, The Dragon Round, was published by Simon & Schuster earlier this moneth. His work has appeared at AE, Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online, and he has stories forthcoming in Amazing Stories, Deep Magic and Lightspeed. He tweets at @stephenspower, and his website is stephenspower.com.

Fat snowflakes drifted through the frigid air as I trudged along. Snow peppered my spectacles, leaving them fogged and just better than useless, and eerie stillness pressed in from all sides.

I glanced at my hardly-legible notes, instructions cobbled together from a handful of third-hand accounts. The fear that had urged me into the woods had cooled to a bitter resolve. I would not be bullied into a loveless marriage, no matter how many times Lady Tessie implied that she'd throw me out into the street if I didn't accept one of her "perfectly lovely gentlemen."

A single set of footprints marred the blank snow of the path before me, vanishing into the gray mass of winter trees. My fingers and toes ached from the cold, but I pressed on. The only sounds were my ragged breathing and the creak of snow under my boots.

Ahead, the path widened into a clearing, just as my directions said that it would. A tiny cottage nestled in the trees at the far end, dark and ramshackle. I'd imagined that the Witch House would be grander. But I'd come too far to be discouraged by appearances. I followed the footprints through the broken front door.

The air smelled of mildew and rot, and shadows choked the single room. "Hello?" My voice was thin and vulnerable, and the darkness swallowed it.

A hooded figure stepped into the thin winter sunlight that seeped around my shadow. "You shouldn't be here, girl."

"My name is Elinor."

"I do not care what your name is, girl."

"Who are you?"

"That is not your concern."

I took another step into the building, tried to glimpse the face under the hood. I could see only darkness. "I am looking for the Witch of the Wood."

"You may wait, if you'd like." She waved toward a wooden stool in the corner.

I perched on it, and the uneven legs wobbled beneath me. It was no warmer inside the shack than out, but at least it was some protection from the snow and wind. I smoothed my notes on my skirt. "So, she is real, then." I glanced around the decrepit room.

"Indeed. How did you find this place?"

"Research," I said. I'd always loved books and stories, especially the ones my mother told of the Witch of the Wood.

The hooded woman stepped forward and held out a gloved hand. I handed over my notes. It examined the slip of paper for a long moment. "Your penmanship is abominable."

I laughed in spite of myself. "So I've been told."

"And you discovered this on your own? Did you tell anyone of your plans to come here?"

A chill ran down my spine. "I keep my own counsel."

My companion heaved a sigh. "You really don't belong here, girl."

A touch of fear thrilled through me. "Yet here I am."

"What do you want of the Witch of the Wood?" she asked.

"My mother told me bedtime stories," I said. "About how the witch was as beautiful and cold as the moon, about how she bewitched men's hearts and could see the future in pools of water."

"But what do you want from me?" she asked. "Do you want your future told? Or do you need a heart bewitched?" "Wait. You're the Witch of the Wood?"

"I am."

I looked around again. "Is this your home? I thought that you lived in a palace made of bone."

"What is wood but the bones of slain trees?"

I had no time to argue semantics. "I want to be your apprentice."

"No."

"The stories say that the witch must always train a replacement."

"I do not care what the stories say, girl. I am in no state to train anyone." The witch pushed her hood back, and I gaped at her. Her skin was as gray as smoke, but her face looked as youthful as my own. She was nothing like the crone I was expecting.

"I am a shadow of myself. All but the smallest fraction of my power has abandoned me, and all of my efforts to regain it have failed. All I can do now is wait for the end. It will be soon, I think."

"That's a terrible attitude," I said. "You're just going to wait to die? You're the Witch of the Wood, not some simpering damsel."

The witch laughed. "I like you, girl. I am starting to be glad that you came along. But you know nothing of my struggle, and should not rush to judgement."

I stood up. "Be that as it may, there's no reason to just sit here in the cold. Does that chimney still draw?"

The witch nodded, and I built a fire using some of the broken furniture and moth-eaten tapestries. The flickering light drove back the shadows less than it should have, but that didn't surprise me. It did, at least, drive back the cold. I noticed that the draft from the doorway was gone, and saw that the door had repaired itself.

I touched the unmarked wood, but it felt like any ordinary, unmagical door.

There was a cob-web covered broom in one corner, and I set it to the floors.

"What are you doing?" the witch asked.

"Cleaning."

"Why?"

"Because it is something that I can do."

The witch blinked at me. "But it is pointless. The dust will fall again."

"Just because something isn't permanent, that doesn't make it pointless." I added another piece of wood to the fire. "Nothing is permanent."

"But some things never change," the witch said.

Night fell outside. I kept working, till the single room felt warm and welcoming--even the shadows that stretched long looked softer, surrounded by firelight and gleaming wood. The house itself responded to my attention. When I was hungry, a kitchen unfolded itself around the fireplace. I made stew from provisions that appeared as I reached for them, and the savory scent filled the air.

I grinned, satisfied with my efforts. This was more like the magic house I'd been expecting.

I found two bowls and offered one to the witch. We sat in plush armchairs that had appeared by the fire. Her skin looked warmer in the firelight. A chess board appeared between our chairs. The witch had white, so I waited for her move.

I had her in check when the house expanded--hallways opened up to the left and right, and whole house sprouted a second story.

I stood and looked around, marveling at the elegantly arched doorways and the crystal chandelier that hung overhead. The bare floor was now covered with a lush green carpet.

The witch remained, staring at the chessboard. "Do you always get your way, Elinor?" she asked.

I thought about my parents, dead five years now, about the tiny room that Lady Tessie kept me in, about the way my latest suitor had held my hand so hard it bruised. "Rarely, but I believe that I am due."

"My home is restored," the witch said. Her hand hesitated over her queen, then she moved her king out of check.

I made my move. "Checkmate."

The witch frowned at the chessboard. "Before I lost my powers, I had an apprentice, just as every Witch of the Wood before me. She left, and my powers began to fade. I thought that she had cursed me. But now I see, that wasn't the case at all. Your tales had it right--the Witch of the Wood must have an apprentice. That is the way of things. And when I failed to take on a new student, I began to lose my way." She shook her head. "How could I have missed such a simple solution?"

"By maintaining too narrow of a focus?"

"I could find another apprentice, girl. Now that I know that is all I need, any apprentice will do. But the house has taken to you."

As a child, I'd dreamed of becoming a witch, powerful and wise and self-sufficient. I'd set out this morning to make that dream come true. But deep in my heart, I hadn't really believe it was possible. Hope was an unfamiliar feeling in my chest. "Does that mean that I can stay?"

"Yes. And when your training is complete, you will be the Witch of the Wood," the witch said. "And I will move on. Become something else." She stood and stretched. "It has been a long time since I was able to sleep in my own bed. Good night, Elinor."

"Goodnight." I wandered through the main room, trailing my fingers over the new furniture. I covered the remains of the stew and scoured the bowls. Then I went to find the room that would be mine for as long as lived in the Witch House.

Jamie Lackeylives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cat. She has over 120 short fiction credits, and has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Stoker Award-winning After Death.... Her fiction has appeared on the Best Horror of the Year Honorable Mention and Tangent Online Recommended Reading Lists, and she's a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her short story collection, OneRevolution, and her science fiction novella, Moving Forward, are available on Amazon.com. She read submissions for the Hugo-winning Clarkesworld Magazine for five years and was an assistant editor for the Hugo-winning Electric Velocipede from 2012-2013. She served as editor for Triangulation: Lost Voices in 2015 Triangulation: Beneath the Surface in 2016. Her debut novel, Left Hand Gods, will be available from Hadley Rille Books in July 2016. In addition to writing, she spends her time reading, playing tabletop RPGs, baking, and hiking. You can find her online at www.jamielackey.com.

Editor

Curtis Ellett is a frustrated fantasy writer and a founding member of the 196 Southshore Writers' Group. He has lived on three continents, studied archaeology and worked as a newspaper ad designer and a bookseller. He now gets paid to write. Find him on Twitter @CurtisEllett.